How Painful Is Pepper Spray?
By Meredith Melnick Tuesday, November 22, 2011
healthland.time.com
Video footage of police using pepper spray on peacefully protesting students at the University of California, Davis, on Nov. 18 has been a source of national outrage since. But the use of such brutal force against passive protesters isn't as uncommon as you'd think.
Pepper spray and other severe tactics have recently been used with disturbing frequency by police against Occupy protesters — young or old or pregnant — around the nation (see this Atlantic roundup). But the agent's misuse goes back much further: in the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use, according to an excellent post on the dangers of pepper spray by science writer Deborah Blum on Speakeasy Science.
Blum notes that in a 1995 report [PDF], the American Civil Liberties Union of California cited 26 deaths between 1993 and 1995 possibly linked to pepper spray use by police (that's 1 death for every 600 uses); most deaths involved people who had underlying health problems like asthma. And in 1999, following an incident in which California police officers dipped cotton swabs into pepper spray and then forced them into the eyes of anti-logging protesters, the ACLU asked an appeals court to declare the use of pepper spray to be dangerous and cruel.
How painful is getting pepper sprayed? For starters, as Blum points out, police-grade pepper spray gets 5,300,000 Scoville heat units on the Scoville scale of pepper hotness. Compare that to 350,000 Scoville units for the habanero. (Pepper spray — or OC spray, as it's also known — contains the same compound that makes peppers hot, capsaicin, in a super-concentrated extract called oleoresin capsicum.)
In most cases of pepper-spray use, the agent is non-lethal, but as we've noted, it can cause irreparable harm or death.
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Getting pepper-sprayed is worse than getting maced. http://police.berkeley.edu/documents/campus-safety/maceandpepper.pdf
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Classified as a riot-control agent and banned for use in war by Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, pepper spray is meant to be used against violent attackers who are resisting arrest and threatening physical harm to others. That doesn't apply to the passive protesters at U.C. Davis.
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Full story: http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/22/how-painful-is-pepper-spray/
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